Making Tank compatible animals

This is meant to be a quick guide to making tank-compatible, user-created land animals. I’ve tested it on user-created animals made from the saltwater crocodile, brown bear, bengal tiger and sea otter, all with no problems or bugs. However, the sea otter has several characteristics not present in the others, so there may be characteristics that will be need to be added for other animals.

First, all of the following needs to be added to the UCA:

[Characteristics/Integers]
; shadows for this unit
cUsesRealShadows = 1
cHasShadowImages = 1
cHasUnderwaterSection = 1
cExpansionID=2

; Underwater characteristics
cUnderwater = 1
cUnderwaterNeeded = 10
cEnterTankChance = 90

cPooWaterImpact = 5
cMurkyWaterChange = -5
cMurkyWaterHealthChange = -5
cMurkyWaterThreshold = 60
cVeryMurkyWaterChange = -10
cVeryMurkyWaterHealthChange = -10
cVeryMurkyWaterThreshold = 20
cExtremelyMurkyWaterChange = -15
cExtremelyMurkyWaterHealthChange = -15
cExtremelyMurkyWaterThreshold= 1
cSalinityChange = -10
cSalinityHealthChange = -20

; Breathing characteristics
cBreathThreshold = 20
cBreathIncrement = 10

;tank filter
v = 6471
v = 100

In addition, the following characteristics were listed under the ;Underwater Characteristics for the sea otter, but not the saltwater croc, bengal tiger or brown bear:

cOnlyUnderwater = 0
cDepth = 1
; Avoid tank walls
cAvoidEdges = 1

I know that all of these characteristics are not absolutely necessary to make the graphics work, but they do apply to making the animal react to tank conditions, tank depth, etc.

The above characteristic can be added manually (cut-and-paste), or with APE 2.5 by Quivaz, which I believe has most, if not all, of these characteristics added. Once these characteristics have been added to the UCA file, delete all characteristics for animations and delete all behaviors, then copy all this information from the AI file of the animal you’re using as a template into the UCA of the animal you’ve created. The AI files for aquatic animals, both MM and updated ZT, tank-compatible land animals, are in the Zoo Tycoon folder, in the Xpack2 folder, in animalsa.ztd. Unzip the ztd to get to the AI.

I just kept the otter around long enough to verify that it would allow the animal to be tank-compatible. Since it is a show animal and has animations and behaviors specifically for that, further alteration of the UCA may allow user-created animals to be used as show animals also. I didn’t explore that possibility or check the AI of the otter for characteristics that would need to be added to make this possible.

BY: Mngwa on the Zoo Admin Forums HERE